Thirty years after its release on Nov 13, 1995, “GoldenEye” remains one of the most important films in the James Bond franchise. Much like today, the series stood at a crossroads ahead of “GoldenEye”— producers were turning over, a new Bond was being cast and the world around the super spy was moving in a direction that threatened to leave his particular brand of hedonistic heroism in the past.

The situation forced the creatives behind the franchise to adapt, to make critical decisions about what the character looked like in the modern world. They needed to determine what needed updating and what needed to remain the same and, most imperatively, who, both in front of and behind the camera, could execute on the gargantuan task of launching Bond back into audiences’ minds and hearts.  

THE STATE OF BOND CIRCA 1990

The early 1990s was a time of turbulence for the Bond movies. Shortly after the lukewarm critical and commercial performance of Timothy Dalton’s sophomore outing as the character in 1989’s “License to Kill,” businessman Giancarlo Parretti bought Bond distributor MGM, putting the franchise on hold until his ownership ended in a wave of lawsuits in 1991.

“We had been in an extended lawsuit with MGM which was finally settled when the new management team of Alan Ladd Jr. and Jay Kanter took over,” says “GoldenEye” producer Michael G. Wilson of Eon Productions. By the time the opportunity for more James Bond movies came about, though, some questioned whether the franchise was even worth reviving.

“MGM hired a national research group to do a study to see where Bond fit into moviegoing culture,” reflects Jeff Kleeman, the executive vice president of MGM-United Artists at the time. “The study came back and it reported that pretty much every teenage boy in American had either never heard of James Bond or said, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy my dad likes.’”

Meanwhile, there were shifts within the offices of Eon, where longtime Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was handing off the franchise’s reins to his daughter and step-son, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. “Cubby couldn’t be part of this film,” says Bond historian John Cork, who consulted on the franchise during the period. “His health was not going to allow it. He was in meetings when I was there, but not all the time. His input and wisdom was always appreciated, but he was very hands off.” While Barbara Broccoli and Wilson had been involved in the franchise for years, this was their first opportunity to properly take up their father’s mantle. They were big shoes to fill.

Meanwhile, the world itself had changed around Bond. Months after “License to Kill” was released, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. James Bond was a Cold War hero, so now that the conflict was over, the creative team had to figure out Bond’s purpose in the new global political climate.  

MGM’s new president Frank Mancuso Sr. was rightfully skeptical, but Broccoli, Wilson, Kleeman and fellow United Artists colleague John Calley were determined to figure out a story that worked.

In the years since “License to Kill,” a few treatments and drafts of a new Bond film had been considered. One was from writer Michael France. “When John Calley and I got to United Artists, the Michael France draft already existed,” says Kleeman. “Michael and Barbara were pretty fond of the France draft. Calley and I were not especially fond of it, and when we said we wanted to make another Bond movie, we felt the script needed a lot of work and we wanted to bring in new writers.”

DRAFTING THE RIGHT DIRECTOR

As they searched for new writers to polish the script, they also had to find a director. “We made a very strong case to Frank Mancuso to let us make the film,” Kleeman says. “He eventually said, ‘OK, I’ll give you $49 million all-in to make a Bond movie, but no more.’ So part of the calculus for who was going to direct this movie was, could we find somebody who we thought was a really strong, interesting director, but would also really stretch that $49 million as far as it could possibly go.”

New Zealand-born director Martin Campbell had a limited filmography at the time. Though he had been directing since the 1970s, only his three latest features had reached wide audiences, and even then, they were far from blockbusters. The team, however, was impressed with his work on television and his apparent resourcefulness in telling action-adventure stories.

“I had just finished shooting a movie in Australia and I came back to L.A.,” recalls Campbell. “I got a call from John Calley to come visit and he said ‘How would you like to direct the Bond film?’ And so I said, ‘Sure, why not.’ It was as simple as that.”

FINDING THE NEXT 007

The new Bond film had its director, but the question that loomed largest was who would play Bond. “Barbara and Michael wanted to bring Timothy back, and we thought Timothy was a great person and a great actor, but we didn’t want this to feel like a continuation of the Dalton Bond movies,” says Kleeman. “We explored Mel Gibson. We explored Liam Neeson. We explored Ralph Fiennes.”

However, Kleeman and Callie were keen on Pierce Brosnan, a dashing young Irish actor who had auditioned for the part alongside Dalton during the franchise’s last transition. He got the role, but had to drop out when his TV show, “Remington Steele” was unexpectedly renewed. He starred in the series throughout the 1980s, and by the early ’90s, he was playing side-characters in movies like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Love Affair.” Despite his lack of leading man pedigree, he had the charm, look and sophistication to become the next Bond.

As confident as Kleeman and Calley were that Brosnan was their guy, they still had to convince Broccoli and Wilson. “We ended up having a meeting with Barbara and Michael and Cubby, because Cubby was still involved at this point. Barbara and Michael made their case for Timothy and we made our case for Pierce,” says Kleeman. “And there was silence and then Cubby gently tapped his walking stick on the floor. We all turned to him and he said ‘Let’s make it with Pierce.’ And that was that.”

Campbell felt more confident from the beginning. “Everybody had to agree on who should play Bond, but to be honest, I think Pierce was always going to get it,” he says. “We went around the world to different places for other potential Bonds, but really we knew it was going to be him.”

Agreeing on who would slip into Bond’s tux was a relief, but the expanding team was far from the finish line. As Keene explains, “We had a package that was not that exciting to MGM. We had a TV actor who is now playing supporting roles in movies as our James Bond. We had a director who had directed three feature films, all of which flopped. We had a script that even we admit still needed a lot of work. We had one ailing veteran producer in Cubby and two essentially neophyte producers in Barbara and Michael. And we had IP that the research said was very old and rickety and of no interest to the contemporary movie audience.”

WRITERS, WRITERS, WRITERS

While the producers had faith in Brosnan and Campbell, generating interest in the IP depended on finding a compelling story. The Michael France script still needed work, so they hired English screenwriter Jeffrey Caine to do a rewrite. Like Campbell, Caine had a modest list of credits at the time, having only written for television, but Broccoli trusted him from their past work together.   

“Michael France turned in his second draft of the film that would become ‘GoldenEye’ and I think [Barbara] realized that she needed to change writers. She wasn’t happy at all, so she hired me and I did a page-one rewrite,” says Caine. “Barbara gave me a free hand and I did a total rewrite, started it where it should have started and put it into three acts.”

“Everybody seemed happy with the result,” Caine continues. “Except at some point they brought in another writer to do things that I could have done, but nobody asked me to do it. You know how it goes in this industry.”

“We worked with Jeffrey for quite a bit,” reflects Campbell, “And then Kevin Wade came in. Wade wrote ‘Working Girl’ for Mike Nichols and we had him for a month. I think that’s all we could afford. We had literally thirty days with Kevin Wade, who kicked the structure into where it should be. I mean, he really put the architecture of the script together.”

After Wade’s thirty days, the team hired Bruce Feirstein, author of the bestselling satire book, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche,” to come punch up some of Bond’s dialogue. “I was writing for Vanity Fair and the editorial page of the New York Times,” says Feirstein, “And one afternoon Barbara called and said, ‘How would you like to come to London and write a couple of jokes for Bond?’ So then, I went and I met Michael for the first time and saw Martin.”

It ended up being more than just a few jokes. “I read the script and thought that Caine’s work was fantastic,” he remembers. “It was great and I loved the script, but I thought it needed a point of reference. We were six years out from the last Bond and my idea was: ‘The world had changed, but Bond hadn’t’”

Corroborating this mantra, Cork, who MGM hired to develop pitches for future Bond films, wrote up a document for the studio called “Bond in the Nineties.” “I tend to refer to it as kind of a character Bible,” he said, “I talked about a return to the glamour and the sexiness of Bond” through a rigorous study of the character from Ian Fleming’s original novels to the latest movies.

Armed with these guiding principles, Feirstein worked on a rewrite that gave shape to Bond within the story. That story involved contemporary technology, where the threats are rogue post-Soviet soldiers who hijack a satellite weapon capable of wiping out all communication in the Western world. At some point, Wilson suggested that the satellite be called “GoldenEye,” after the name of Ian Fleming’s Jamaican estate where he wrote the Bond books.

Despite the story’s modern elements, it was imperative that Bond retain his quintessential elements. He would still be smooth and sophisticated. He would still sleep with lots of women, sip vodka martinis and kill bad guys, and the world around him may react a little differently to the roguish spy, but he would still save that world in the end.

ASSEMBLING THE ENSEMBLE

The Brosnan Bond was figured out, but as the script received its final touches, the rest of the characters were still being cast. Bond is not the only recurring archetype in the franchise, and the “GoldenEye” script included new Bond villains and Bond girls that fit into the modern era.

Pivotally, the script’s main antagonist was Alec Trevelyan— a.k.a. 006, who turns against MI6 out of vengeance for his parents’ death, which was caused by Britain’s neglect of the Soviet Union a generation ago. “What we really wanted was an adversary for Pierce who felt physically, intellectually equal to him. We had this concept of 006 versus 007, so in some ways we needed someone who could have been James Bond playing the villain,” says Kleeman.

Casting director Debbie McWilliams identified Sean Bean, the Yorkshire-born actor who performed in the Royal Shakespeare Company and was more recently recognized as the titular soldier in the TV series “Sharpe.”

Trevelyan was not the only villain in the film, though. They also had to find someone who could play Xenia Onatopp, a beautiful Russian assassin capable of seducing her targets and crushing their heads between her legs. The search for someone who could play the intense villainess was ongoing when Clive Barker brought a young Dutch actress named Famke Janssen to his MGM project, “Lord of Illusions.”

“She was great,” says Kleeman. “We liked her so much in ‘Lord of Illusions’ that we put her up for the role in ‘GoldenEye’”

“I was asked to come in and audition and I think I was one of the three who was asked to do a screen test with Pierce Brosnan. I will never forget that audition,” recalls Janssen. “I was a struggling actress who had gotten some parts and a lot of rejections, so it was an incredible opportunity and I just went for broke. I had nothing to lose so I just really went big.”

Big was exactly what Xenia needed and Janssen’s audacity paid off as she was cast in the part. The rest of the cast was filled in with some new and familiar faces. Samantha Bond was the new Miss Moneypenny, Alan Cumming joined as tech henchman Boris Grishenko, Robbie Coltrane as Russian mafioso Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky, Tchéky Karyo as Defense Minister Dmitri Mishkin, Gottfried John as General Arkady Ourumov, Joe Don Baker as CIA operative Jack Wade and Judi Dench as the newly imagined female M— a gender switch for the character inspired by MI5’s recently appointed first female Director General, Stella Rimington. The only returning cast member from “License to Kill” was Desmond Llewelyn, reprising his long-running role as Q.

Still, a pivotal character was yet to be cast. Two weeks away from production, they still hadn’t found the right fit for “GoldenEye”’s Bond girl, Natalya Simonova. They had searched far and wide for someone who could play the smart and beautiful Russian programmer opposite Brosnan’s Bond. “We just couldn’t find her,” recalls Campbell, “I remember sitting with Debbie and I said, ‘You’ve covered every country in Europe.’ She said, ‘Except Sweden,’ so Barbara put her on a plane that night.”

In Sweden, McWilliams scouted a modeling shoot on the island of Gotland, where she spotted a young actress named Izabella Scorupco, who bore a striking resemblance to the Natalya of Campbell’s storyboards.

“I did an audition for Debbie in Gotland. I just thought it was amazing that I was going to be part of the audition. I really didn’t expect anything more.” says Scorupco. “And a week later, I was asked to go to London to meet Martin Campbell. I came in and I read for him. It was only me and him in the room, and I had no idea that, by that time, I already got the part from the previous audition I did in Sweden. Literally, as I was done with my scene, the whole production just storms in and fires up champagne.”

There was due cause for celebration. “GoldenEye” was finally cast, with just two weeks to spare before cameras started rolling.

PRODUCTION

The globe-trotting film shot on locations around the world, from the mountains of Switzerland to the jungles of Puerto Rico. “It was probably 115 or 16 days,” says Campbell. “You go to different countries, all of which have to be incorporated into a tight schedule.”

Ironically, the trickiest location to lock-in may have been the sound stage back in London. The iconic Bond stage at Pinewood studios was booked, so they had to find somewhere else to build their sets.

“We had to build a makeshift studio for the production,” recalls Wilson, “Which we did at a former Rolls Royce engine factory in Leavesden outside London, the site that later became Warner Bros Studios Leavesden. It was very challenging building the studio framework at the same time as we were constructing the sets for filming and would not have happened without our production designer, Peter Lamont who had been in the art department of the Bond series since ‘Goldfinger.’”

In addition to Lamont’s production design work, “GoldenEye” also marked the final film of miniature effects artist Derek Meddings. “One of the things that ended with ‘GoldenEye’ was the use of miniatures in special effects,” recalls Kleeman, “Derek did staggering work with miniatures for the satellite station and all sorts of stuff in ‘GoldenEye.’ It’s become a lost art in Hollywood.”

Between Lamont’s sets and Meddings’ miniatures, “GoldenEye” was committed to practical effects at a time when CGI was accelerating. “We could go CGI or we could go physical effects,” continues Kleeman. “And most of the films were heading in the CGI direction. And so when you see that bungee jump at the beginning of the movie, that was really Martin planting a flag and very intentionally shooting it and doing it in a way where he is saying ‘This is a movie where we have made a choice not to go the CGI route, but to go, in every possible moment, the genuine physical effects route.’”

Though the opening scene where Bond bungee jumps from a towering dam into a Russian military force was not actually directed by Martin, but by second unit director Ian Sharpe with stunt coordinator Simon Crane, it was a thrilling introduction to the movie to come— bold, exciting, and visually striking while still remaining relatively grounded.

“They won that audience with that opening scene of the dam jump,” says Cork, reflecting on the movie’s premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, “I mean, that audience was just holding their breath during that shot.”

EDITING, MARKETING, AND RELEASE

Because of Campbell’s resourcefulness and thorough storyboards, the expansive production ran smoothly and editing was efficient. “I shoot to edit,” explains Campbell. “Plus, Terry Rawlings was the editor, who is terrific.”

During post, the marketing campaign got underway ahead of the November release. Campbell and the actors did a global press tour, and trailers began to appear in cinemas and on television. “Maybe the unsung hero of bringing Bond back into popular culture was an executive at MGM named Joe Nimziki,” says Kleeman. “Joe was the guy who came up with the idea for, directed and shot the teaser trailer for ‘GoldenEye.’ It was this little bit that had the tag, ‘You Know the Name, You Know the Number’ and it revealed Pierce’s Bond for the first time.” Nimziki would also direct the full-length trailer, which showcased shots from the film and revealed some of the story.

A few private screenings were held in Los Angeles, generating buzz, but the film’s big public premiere was in New York City on Nov. 13. “They decided to rent out Radio City Music Hall and they did this big old time premiere,” says Cork. “There was a whole Bond convention the day before in New York City. Radio City Music Hall was packed to the gills and it was just glittering with excitement. It just felt like Bond was back and the world was damn happy about it.”

Indeed, Bond was back. The film was a hit with critics and audiences, grossing over $350 million at the worldwide box office— more than twice of what “License to Kill” grossed six years prior— proving that the franchise had a life ahead of it.

LECACY

“GoldenEye”’s success gave Eon the ability to continue the franchise at MGM. Brosnan starred in three additional films, as the Bond of the ’90s evolved into the Bond of the aughts. His tenure as the character ended in 2002 with the release of “Die Another Day.” Campbell did not direct another Brosnan film, but returned when Broccoli and Wilson reimagined Bond again in 2006, with Daniel Craig taking up the role in “Casino Royale.”

“Everybody who’s played Bond was really good in some way,” says Feirstein. “The scripts and the actors were representative of their time. Connery was the perfect Cold War Bond. Roger Moore reflected the Reagan-era. Tim Dalton, who had far too few films, hit all the right notes for the fall of the Soviet Union, and Daniel Craig was perfect as the post 9/11 Bond.”

The Brosnan films, with “GoldenEye” as their flagship, seems to be the connective tissue between these decades, retaining the cheeky wit of the older Bond films, while elevating them with bigger set pieces, bolder stunts and a more contemporary story.

Its legacy looms large, not least of all because of the wildly successful “GoldenEye” video game, which Nintendo released in 1997. “The video game was a massive success,” says Kleeman. “It made it so not only did every teenager once again know who Bond was, but all of the kids who weren’t yet teenagers, who hadn’t heard of the movies, saw their older siblings playing the game with their friends and were excited to become Bond fans”

Feirstein remarks, “When I tell young people that I wrote ‘GoldenEye,’ they all ask, ‘The video game or the movie?’ I say, ‘the movie,’ and they’re always disappointed, because this entire generation grew up playing that game.”

Accordingly, the first Bond property being released under its new owners at Amazon is not a film, but a video game: “007 First Light,” set to release next year. Amazon bought MGM and the Bond library in 2022, after the release of Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing as Bond in 2021’s “No Time To Die.” Cubby Broccoli died months after “GoldenEye’”s release, but Barbara and Wilson continued to produce all of the Bond movies throughout Craig’s tenure before Amazon bought out their creative control of the franchise earlier this year.

The series is yet again facing a transition, not unlike the era leading up to “GoldenEye.” David Heyman and Amy Pascal will produce the next Bond film, with Denis Villeneuve attached to direct. They are all experienced in the art and business of moviemaking, but new to James Bond moviemaking. Likewise, the world has once again changed dramatically since the franchise’s last reinvention in 2006. Just as “GoldenEye” had to figure out who Bond was in the ’90s, the next film must determine who Bond is today, and what kind of world he’s saving.